CROCKPOT NOT-THE-REAL-THING PORK SHOULDER & Ridgewood Sauce
Mom and Dad one year after wedding (which was on July 11, 1964). I just found this photo yesterday and I love it! Mom and Dad look so young and happy!
”The soft-aired Tennessee night gathers its children in its cupped hands.”
- Excerpt from Arrivederci Kingsport by Charles Wright
Dad, on the left, with his mother (in an amazing hat!) and sister, Lisa, standing in front of the Reed family house on Watauga Street. My great-grandparents built it and my grandfather, Shelton, grew up in it. When he married my grandmother the house was given to them so they could raise their family there. Growing up, I spent almost every Christmas and a good portion of my summers in Kingsport.
Mom’s family had a few houses in Kingsport when she was a child and this is one of them. Here she is photographed with her parents and brothers. All are gone now except my Uncle Frank, which must feel weird.
Accidental photo of Mom and Dad together getting a golfer’s autograph. They had been in Kindergarten band together but didn’t become friends (or start dating) until High School.
No, this is not me in drag. It’s actually my father. My mom notes in my dad’s Ancestry.com listing that he was “quite a thespian!”. My mom’s mother (my Nonnie) must have volunteered for the production because she made this costume and apparently came to really like my father. Dad credits Nonnie with helping Mom to see the light and date him.
“Big Brother Is Watching You (Lovingly, though, Lovlingly)”. Sweet (and funny!) that Mom kept this photo while she and Dad were dating long distance.
This caption cracks me up. Mom was funny. And organized. Who labels their photos in Photoshop?! Mom and Dad got married in Kingsport right after Dad graduated from MIT. The same band played at my Aunt Jane’s wedding 20+ years later (and she wore my mom’s dress)!
I never saw these photos before yesterday. They made me laugh. I’m not sure the images were cause and effect but I’m going to pretend they were. Mom and Dad lived in Rye, NY right after they were married while Dad attended Columbia for grad school. Mom taught Junior High English in Port Chester, NY.
Arrivederci Kingsport
By Charles Wright
It’s all Interstate anymore,
The sedge fields Ted Glynn and I
Would shoot doves on. Or underwater.
The Country Music Highway, out of the hollers and backwash
Of southeastern Kentucky, old U.S. 23,
Has carried the boys to a different demarcation,
Their voices like field mice in the 21st-century wind.
Goodbye to that stuff,
The late ‘40s and early ‘50s and adolescence,
Dolores Urquiza and Clara Hall
–memory’s music just out of tune–
Drifting in their 7th-grade frocks across the Civic Auditorium floor.
Goodbye to Sundays, and band practice,
the backseats of cars,
Goodbye to WKPT and everybody’s song.
Jesus, it’s all still a fist of mist
That keeps on cleaning my clock,
Tick-tock, my youth, tick-tock, my youth,
Everything going away again and again toward the light.
Who will remember Christina Marsh and Bobby Step,
now that I’m gone?
Who will remember the frog famine,
Now that the nameless roads
have carried us all from town?
Midsommer in 1951,
the censer gone,
The call-and-response both gone, how far away is that?
A life unremarkable, but one which was remarked,
It turns out. Without consolation, it seemed,
adolescence,
That summer seeped to its end.
The sweet moke of the past like bandages
on all our imagined wounds.
And once upon a time, in the long afternoons of autumn,
The boys and girls would lay them down
in the bitter weeds
And watch the hidden meanderings
Of stars in their luminous disguise,
that ill-invested blue.
Is there reprieve for this act?
Is there reprieve for such regard?
Not in this life, and not in the next.
Well, yes, but beside the point.
And what is the point?
The point is the drawn-own landfall
From Chestnut Ridge to Moccasin Gap.
The point is U.S. 11W disappearing
In front of us and behind our backs,
the winter winds
And the clouds that dog our footsteps out west and back east.
And so the dance continues,
Boots Duke and Jackie Imray,
Bevo and Kay Churchill,
Jim Churchill and Nancy Sims,
Name after name dropping into the dark waters of day-before-yesterday.
Champe Beachelder and Karen Beall,
Bill Ring and Sarah Lou,
Slow dance, the music coming up again.
Goodnight, sweetheart, well, it’s time to go.
Ta-ta-ta-ta-tum, Goodnight, sweetheart, well, it’s time to go,
the soft-aired Tennessee night
Gathers its children in its cupped hands.
Time has its covenant, and who’s to say that it is unjust.
We make our sad arrangements.
The sky clears, the sun sets.
No matter the words, we never forget our own song.
Yesterday would have been my parents’ 57th wedding anniversary. I wanted to write a blog post in honor of that but didn’t know where to start. So, I began poking around Mom’s ancestry.com site (she was an accomplished genealogist) and found her listings on us. Strange, I had never thought to look. But, true to Mom’s style, she diligently entered in major life events, uploaded photos (which she corrected in Photoshop) with appropriate, and often funny, captions, and kept records for all of my family. It would have been a shame if this had gone unnoticed, so I’m glad I found it. Mom did the work because she believed it was the right thing to do and it was her way to contribute to our family’s legacy. Included in her photos was the above poem by Charles Wright, a fellow Tennessean and one time US Poet Laureate. Mom noted next to it, “I weep every time I read this”. Man, it cuts right to the gut for me, too. Mom and Dad were certainly two of the “children cupped in soft-aired Tennessee night”. Even though they ultimately left, Tennessee was such a part of who they were.
Mom and Dad both grew up in Kingsport. It is an interesting town. Located in the Northeast corner of Tennessee, it’s gorgeous geographically – mountains and valleys and rivers – but blighted by the chemical smells and unsightly factories of Eastman Kodak and a paper plant. Oddly, what ruined some of the natural beauty of the town contributed positively to Kingsport’s culture. Eastman brought in interesting people to work there, my mom’s father, a chemical engineer, among them. So, despite being a smallish town in Appalachia, it had more going for it than its neighbors. My Dad’s family was originally from Western Virginia. My great grandfather was a doctor and, upon moving to Tennessee, he started the first hospital in Kingsport. He would often take my grandfather, Shelton, along with him on calls (sometimes on horseback!), instilling in my grandfather a medical curiosity and strong work ethic. Shelton went East for school, first on an Eastman scholarship for the flute to the University of Rochester where he met my Yankee grandmother. (It tickles me to think of this. My Grandpa was a big man - like 6’ 5” - so the idea of him playing a flute or, even better, a piccolo, is entertaining.) After that, he went on to Harvard Medical School. The plan was to come back to Kingsport upon graduation and marriage, just to get his feet wet, and then return to the East once he had some experience. Well, much to my Grandmother’s chagrin, they never went back. Kingsport, it was! And, what’s more, they lived in the very house my Grandpa grew up in! My poor Grandma just couldn’t escape Tennessee or the Reeds.
But it worked out for me that they stayed because my parents were both raised in Kingsport. I always thought that my parents met in Latin Club. That’s the story I told for years because it seemed plausible and very “them”. Apparently that’s not the case. I can’t remember how they really got tangled up (I’m sure my Dad will email me tomorrow!), but I do know Mom was a year ahead of Dad in high school and Dad admits that she was out of his league. He once performed in a play and my mom’s mother made his costume (see photo above) and was charmed by him. Evidently she saw beneath the glasses and stage makeup and thought, “Dale could use a little of this!”. Dad, to this day, credits my Nonnie with helping him get Mom.
Mom and Dad dated in high school and then she went off to Duke, leaving them to have a long distance relationship. Dad was ready to get out of Tennessee and once Mom was gone he had even more incentive, so he went to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts for his senior year of high school. When he graduated Deerfield, he then went to college at MIT. It’s my understanding that he and Mom may have casually dated some other people during those years but they were still mainly a couple and attached. When Mom finished up Duke, she was excited that she got into Harvard for grad school because 1. She could be near my dad and 2. It was freaking Harvard. So, Mom moved off to Cambridge and I think my parents may have sneakily lived together (my Reed grandparents would NOT have approved!). As soon as Dad graduated from MIT (remember he was a year younger that my Mom) my parents went back home to Kingsport for the summer to get married. There are a bunch of photos from what looks like 2 solid weeks of wedding parties. Mom and Dad lived at our family farm near Jonesboro, Tennessee that summer and Dad worked as a DJ at a local country radio station. Fall took them to New York where they got an apartment outside of the city in Rye while Dad attended Columbia grad school and Mom taught English at a junior high in Port Chester.
Finding all of these photos yesterday, I was surprised by how young Mom and Dad were AND, frankly, how cool they were. It looks like they had a great time in their early years. I knew them later on when they had their act more together and were mature(ish), but, man, I *wish* that I had known them back then. I think I would have liked them. There were several photos of each of them playing guitar, surrounded by people. They were each a force on their own and, together, they were truly a power couple. Mom and Dad really carved out a cool life for themselves and I have to say it certainly inspired the way I live. I can’t say that all 50+ years of their marriage were winners but who can? (On our anniversary I like to thank my husband for “15 GREAT years!” to which he replies, “but we’ve been married for 21?!”. You get my point.)
I haven’t been to Kingsport since my Grandpa Reed died in 2010. My aunt Lisa spends some time there each year but my Uncle Michael is the one left who still lives there full time. Growing up, Kingsport was my second home. We spent holidays and summers there. At one point I tried to convince Mom after Christmas to just let me stay there and go to school, mainly because I didn’t want to do the 5 hour winding-through-the-mountains drive home with Dad smoking, but I also did really like Kingsport! I keep going back to the Charles Wright poem:
Time has its covenant, and who’s to say that it is unjust.
We make our sad arrangements.
The sky clears, the sun sets.
No matter the words, we never forget our own song.
______________
Arrivederci Kingsport, indeed.
For today’s recipe, I wanted to do something Kingsport-specific. In Mom’s recipe file I found text, written by Dad (I think), about barbecue from a place called The Ridgewood in East Tennessee. I’ll post more about it below.
Mom and Dad, the BBQ Power Couple. Check out their book on NC BBQ called Holy Smoke.
[Excerpt from my parents’ book Holy Smoke]
Midway between Johnson City and Bristol in upper East Tennessee, not far from where my wife and I grew up in Kingsport, stands the small town of Bluff City. Just outside the town is a barbecue joint known simply as "The Ridgewood," a modest-looking place that since 1948 has served what People magazine has called the best barbecue in the country – and therefore, presumably, in the world.
But (I hear you say) what does People know about barbecue? OK, try this: The Ridgewood is the only out-of-state establishment mentioned in Bob Garner's recent book, North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored by Time. Given Tar Heel chauvinism in these matters (largely justifiable), that is testimonial indeed. Of course, Bluff City is only some 25 miles from the North Carolina line, though nearly twice that far by mountain roads.
People drive a long way to eat at the Ridgewood, despite its capricious hours and service that can range from brusque to surly, service almost as legendary as the food. The indispensible guide, Real Barbecue, by Greg Johnson and Kingsport boy Vince Staten, quotes one long-time customer who said that going to the Ridgewood was like going to the Don Rickles Restaurant, but people keep flocking to the Ridgewood for the barbecue: good pork, well smoked, served with an incomparable sauce.
Let me tell you about that sauce. Like most sauces west of the mountains, the Ridgewood's is sweet, thick, and red. But the flavor is marvelously complex -- what catsup will taste like in heaven. This nectar is poured over the pork sandwiches before they are served, and the management has definite ideas about how much sauce to use: a lot. There are no squeeze bottles of sauce on the tables. You eat what's put before you.
Naturally the ingredients are a closely guarded secret, but a few years ago some ladies in Kingsport, no doubt tired of driving 30 miles to find the place closed, set out to duplicate the sauce. The recipe they came up with is a reasonable facsimile, and I will share it with you:
MOCK-RIDGEWOOD BARBECUE SAUCE
24 oz. (weight) catsup
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp good prepared mustard
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup oil
5 Tbsp white sugar
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 large garlic clove, minced
3 Tbsp molasses
1 Tbsp Kitchen Bouquet
1 Tbsp Tabasco sauce
salt and pepper to taste (start with 1/4 tsp)
Mix these ingredients in a bowl, then blend the mix in a blender. Put the goop in a pot and heat it to the boiling point, then simmer it for 15-20 minutes. This recipe makes about a quart, and the sauce freezes well.
You probably don't want to baste with this, because the sugar in it makes it turn black and ugly-looking (although it still tastes good). It makes a fine dipping sauce for ribs, and -- don't tell anybody I told you this -- it's also great on beef brisket, or chicken. Shoot, I've been known to eat it with a spoon. But it's best the way the Ridgewood serves it: Just pour it on some sliced or pulled pork, heaped on a big, warm, white-bread bun.
And if you're ever in upper East Tennessee, stop by the source. Maybe it will be open.
Now, what do you put that sauce on? Well, first, I suggest you buy my parents’ book Holy Smoke for the whole story on smoking your own pork. The proper way to cook BBQ is with wood, not gas. My Dad actually started an organization called True Cue whose purpose is to recognize and certify BBQ restaurants who cook the proper way. That said, sometimes you just don’t have the time or energy to do things right, so I’ll share a Crockpot Pork Butt recipe with you.
CROCKPOT NOT-THE-REAL-THING PORK SHOULDER
If you don’t have a good barbecue joint nearby, and you don’t have the equipment or the time or – well, the character to do it right yourself, what do you do? There’s a case to be made for going down to the grocery store and picking up a carton of Griffin’s or Brookwood Farms to reheat. At least the state requires what’s sold as barbecue in grocery stores to be smoke-cooked, and if you don’t read the list of ingredients on the label too closely you can almost pretend you’ve got run-of-the-mill take-out.
But if you have the misfortune to live somewhere where the grocery stores don’t stock barbecue, then these instructions from the North Carolina Pork Council will produce a facsimile – what some folks call pseudo-Q or, less politely, faux-Q:
Put a 4 to 5 pound Boston butt in a slow cooker with about 1/3 cup cider vinegar and a tablespoon or two of molasses.
Cook for 10 hours or more.
Cool, debone, remove skin and excess fat.
Chop or pull meat, splashing with barbecue sauce (Eastern or Piedmont – OR RIDGEWOOD! Your call).
It’s not right, it’s not barbecue, but it’s pretty much what’s served at a good many “barbecue” establishments these days. You might think of sticking the cooked butt under the broiler to crisp the skin and brown the outside meat, and maybe adding a little (sshhh) “liquid smoke” to the sauce.
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